Jshon parses, reads and creates JSON. It is designed to be as usable as
possible from within the shell and replaces fragile ad hoc parsers made
from grep/sed/awk as well as heavyweight one-line parsers made from
perl/python.

Jshon loads JSON text from stdin, performs actions, then displays the last
action on stdout. Some of the options output JSON, others output plain text
meta information. Because Bash has very poor nested data structures, Jshon does
not try to return a native bash data structure as a typical library would.
Instead, Jshon provides a history stack containing all the manipulations.

The big change in the latest release is switching the everything from
pass-by-value to pass-by-reference. In a typical use case (processing AUR
search results for 'python') by-ref is twice as fast and uses one sixth the
memory. If you are editing JSON, by-ref also makes your life a lot easier as
modifications do not need to be manually inserted through the entire stack.

WWW: http://kmkeen.com/jshon/